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If, as legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs asserts, healthy cities need eyes on the street, then healthy cities need ears on the street too. The Sound of Segregation is social infrastructure consisting of a pink toolshed and outdoor sound system, and three social engagement walk shops for hearing what segregation sounds like.

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(1) The Toolshed – Most toolsheds are designed with one way in and one way out. This toolshed was designed with two doors, as a small house, making the toolshed a place of passage, not a dead-end. I had St Louis City neighborhoods in mind when creating this design feature. The CAM courtyard looks great to the eye, but is too big for the body. The entire courtyard is kind-of cut in half, but not all the way, and shares a blurry space with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and the round rear-end of a Serres permanent installation. To reimagine and re-experience the CAM courtyard space, I cut half of it off.

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Not entirely, there is permanent opening that guests can walk through, which actually because a stronger more confident opening by being partly cut off and closed. With two doors, the pink toolshed is essentially a thick “wall” that can be walked through. In a spatial counterintuitive twist, the toolshed reinforces division by “filling-in” a 16’ opening, which served the visitors spatial experience by increasing the intimacy of the CAM’s interior courtyard. Suddenly, the courtyard found a comfortable intimate scale that it has always been wanting.

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Many backyards in St Louis are divided by fences and garages, where private landscape tools are stored. I think of the toolshed as a form that could house public sound tools for the public to share, organize, and program their own acoustic spaces in parks and along sidewalks. The toolshed could be adapted and transformed into bus stops or perhaps public restrooms. These are viable ideas and other designers have thought of them –and enacted variations of these ideas before, as well as the idea of toolsheds serving the double role of art sculpture and utility object. The parts of my idea that is original is (1) the site specificity of the courtyard installation environment, including an understanding and resonance with the two artists exhibiting work in the museum’s interior spaces. (2) This was conceived as a proposal for shared public sound tools that could act as acoustic nodes spreading across the city. (3) As a proposal for evolving a new type of semi-publicprivate space. By situating toolsheds inside of backyard fences and between adjoining backyards, it spatially creates an inner corridor and connetion where neighbors have the option of sharing mutual tools and allowing connections into each others private backyards. Like adjoin hotel rooms, locks could be situated on the exterior of the tool shed doors, allowing mutually shared spaces while retaining territorial control. In this way, Toolshed offers shared semi-common spaces and breaks into private backyard boxes and slotted private backyards. The Sound of Segregation, and Toolshed in particular, has the potential of modeling a new type of semi-public space and produce new kinds of city neighbors.

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The Toolshed’s story is not over, and is in the process of being painted and installed at the Griot Museum of Black history as the Black Herstory Interpretive Center. (See Creative Activity: Black Herstory Memorial). 2) The Walkshops. I guided three public “walkshops” throughout the city to observe and collect sounds from the surrounding neighborhood, with musicians, poets, field scientists, and landscape architects. These field recordings are gathered, archived, and mixed into sound installations, creating aural portraits. Visitors can experience soundscapes of St. Louis neighborhoods in an acoustically designed tool shed in CAM’s courtyard throughout the summer.

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The Sound of Segregation engages different sound and unsound techniques from the Psychological & Brain Sciences, and Philosophy-Neuroscience- Psychology in order to create a unique approach to understanding segregation. Over the course of the summer series, I installed different acoustic urban landscape portraits as well as psychoacoustic two-word poems that engage a phenomenon from psychoacoustics called phantom words (two-words looped together in a manner that allows each person to hear a different thing while listening to the same sounds.) These particular Washington University humanities partners are specialists in the relationship between seeing and hearing. The research of co P.I., Professor Casey O’Callaghan* focuses on the psychological – physiological – phenomenological intersection of sound and vision. O’Callaghan’s research includes how hearing changes seeing. Co-P.I. Professor John Baugh’s* scholarship probes the social and cultural codes hidden in language, like African and black Americans who have to utilize fake white American accents when applying for mortgages, rentals, jobs, or simply making reservations at restaurants.

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For over a decade, I have been working to choreograph pedagogic* experiments with scientists, artists, designers and an international* array of scholars from the humanities, to co-produce innovative pedagogical models and methodologies for interdisciplinary collaboration using social engagement as an art and design tool.

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Hearing plays a large part in how humans construct a dynamic understanding of social, architectural spaces, and cultural landscapes. From sirens to silence, sounds affect everything from our ability to form individual and collective memories, to affecting learning performances. Research demonstrates how sounds and silence, in its various guises, affects how we feel about ourselves, others, and the spaces around us. If we are only trying to see what segregation looks like, we are missing half the picture. The Sound of Segregation is a proof-of-concept that the Design Humanities are responsive, equitable tools for flexing civic muscles. As a civic muscle, this project emerges as contemporary art at the convergence of community engagement and pedagogy that learns how to hear-out for each other, not just look-out for each other, in the global context of division today.

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